Do we like Katherine Johnson?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Decades of quiet, brilliant work, honoured by a president and Congress, with nothing harmful found anywhere in the record.
Katherine Johnson was a research mathematician at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, back when the job title was still "computer" and the computers were people. She calculated the trajectory for the Mercury mission that put the first American in space. Not bad for a day at the office.
Her best-known moment came before John Glenn's 1962 orbit. Glenn asked her to check the electronic computer's results, so she ran the raw numbers through the equations by hand to confirm them. When an astronaut trusts the human over the machine, you know you're dealing with someone special.
She did it inside a system that wasn't built for her. Langley had segregated bathrooms and cafeteria tables, and historian Margot Lee Shetterly says segregation lasted until the end of the NACA era. Johnson kept working through it, and President Obama later said that in her 33 years at NASA she was “a pioneer who broke the barriers of race and gender”.
On the harm test, we found nothing: no nasty words about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, no conspiracy rabbit holes, and no dodgy company. We also found no lawsuits, court cases or allegations against the NASA mathematician. That's a thin file only because there's nothing to put in it, and there's been nothing new on her lately beyond tributes.
The honours are the real stuff: the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, then a Congressional Gold Medal in 2024, accepted on behalf of Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Christine Darden. NASA's administrator said the women “made it possible for Earthlings to lift beyond the bounds of Earth”. Johnson had died by then, so her family took the medal.
So would we support her? Absolutely. She was brilliant, she worked in a place that tried to keep her in a box, and she did the job so well that the space race depended on her. Her legacy is a good one to point young people at.